Tala has become a large trend lately. the main reason is that it uses an unconventional way of lending people money. Often when we are going to the bank to lend money. They are requesting things like stable income, good payment history etc.

But there is a huge flaw in this approach. The main reason being that most emerging markets or people trying to start something, do not have this kind of foundation to stand on. They are trying to make something happen.

And the market for this kind of money is huge. You could call it a mini angle investing market. This is not only a third world problem. Even in bigger markets the banks are restrictive to lending money without security.

So what is unique with Tala?

It looks at the person behind? It looks at multiple signals on your mobile phone like usage pattern, charge cycles, apps you have installed etc etc. Obviously there is patterns in behaviour that could tell if the person is going to be a good lender. There is microsignal that tell so much about the person that you could start to make informed decisions about this person. How will he build the company. Will it succeed? And as an effect of that, will we get our money bac?

Microsignals

Microsignals is going to be huge. It´s not only in lending we will see this shift. Every form of industri is going to see an rapid transformation. From e-commerce to dating. Computers will learn how to harness the power of the individual behind the user!

Cross-device tracking describes the myriad ways platforms, publishers and ad tech companies try to identify Internet users across smartphones, tablets and desktop computers. The goal of cross-device tracking is to be able to know that the person using smartphone X is the same person who uses tablet Y and laptop Z, and then allow brands to retarget that person accordingly.

Why is this important?

Because retargeting on mobile is essentially impossible without it. Retargeting occurs when a brand identifies a visitor to its website and subsequently serves an ad to that consumer when they are browsing elsewhere. If a person is perusing Chuck Taylors on Zappos, for instance, they may see a Zappos banner ad for high-tops when visiting Yahoo Finance the next day.

So what’s the problem?

Retargeting on desktops is relatively easy because of “cookies” — small text files that log when a certain user visits a certain site. Cookies are essentially irrelevant on the mobile Web, however. Cookies work Google’s Chrome app for iPhones or Chrome on Android, Google’s mobile operating system, according to Are Traasdahl, CEO of cross-device tracking firm Tapad. But cookies don’t work on the countless other apps consumers use. This makes it difficult to track a consumer’s activity both within and across given devices. And given the mind-boggling and ever-growing number of mobile devices, platforms, publishers and mobile operating systems, the problem is only becoming more complex.

So what’s the solution?

There are two routes to cross-device tracking, according to Tom Phillips, CEO at marketing technology company Dstillery, “deterministic” and “probabilistic.” Deterministic cross-device tracking is when publishers and platforms ask their users to sign in to their websites and apps on every device they use. This allows digital media properties to track their users across devices exactly. Facebook and Twitter, for example, require users to sign in for both their desktop and mobile experiences, thus allowing them to offer precise retargeting capabilities across devices.

And for the rest of the platforms and publishers out there?

Probabilistic cross-device tracking is an inexact science carried out by ad tech companies like Drawbridge or Traashdahl’s Tapad. These companies aggregate information about ads served on smartphones, tablets and desktops, and then use statistical models to infer who is using which device. It’s an incredibly complex process that requires troves of data to do well. Tapad, for instance, collects 250 billion distinct data points per month, Traasdahl said, including the IP address, device type and app or Web browser associated with various ads served. Over time, patterns emerge about how consumers move across devices.

How accurate is probabilistic?

As the name indicates, probabilistic cross-device tracking is a well-informed estimate. Ad tech companies generally operate from anywhere from 60 to 90 percent accuracy.

Why go through all the trouble?

Many say that the inability to track consumers across devices is what’s preventing brands from spending heavily on mobile advertising. If publishers and platforms can prove that a smartphone resulted in a later purchase on a desktop, then brands will be more willing to spend on mobile, the thinking goes. Tracking consumers across devices is also integral to understanding how consumer behavior differs on mobile versus desktops. The prevailing wisdom is that these devices fall in different places along the purchase funnel, but exactly where remains unclear.

Do all companies have this problem?

No. As mentioned above, platforms like Twitter and Facebook — companies that have users sign in with one profile at every touchpoint — can retarget users exactly. Google is a leader in this respect, too: It has a handful of products that work across mobile and desktop, all of which can be signed into with a user’s Gmail or Google Plus profile. These companies’ advantage will likely increase now that they’re all operating ad networks, thus enabling them to track their users across devices on other websites. It’s no surprise, then, that they dominate the mobile advertising market.

What about publishers?

Publishers that have convinced users to create profiles and sign in with them on different devices have a similar advantage. But few publishers are able to do this. If you play fantasy football on Yahoo, you have to create a profile and use it for both the desktop and mobile app experiences, thus making you visible across those devices. That’s ostensibly true for paywalled publishers that require subscribers to sign in across devices, too. For most publishers, though, the best cross-device tracking option is to partner with an ad tech company and give advertisers an educated guess.

We are now accepting investment to fund launch and scale our product. We have during the last 6 months developed an automatic AI/machine learning system that can calculate smart information about users like age and gender based on visitors pattherns.

We are looking to distribute tha product aswell as continue to develop our predicitive system further. We are looking for 5.5M SEK, half of this is already commited and we are looking to close the round in the end of the summer.

Apple introduced a new standard in interface design. It took the whole industry to a whole new level. People where not satisfied with half-good system any more.

We now want user experiences that is easy to understand and navigate. But as the industry matures there is still something fundamentel that is not addressed yet:

Very little in websites and apps are tailored to us as individuals

There is already signs of this in the industry, it is not enough to be good, you have to be individual good. Apple are ramping up their data scientist hiring efforts and Google has been working with this for a very long time, as it is a big part of google search engine.

You can not fit all needs, but that is eaxactly how the future are going to pan put. The future is called:

Personal Experience Design

How will this look? Machines will become better at figuring out exactly what you want, and will then adapt to your needs. This will have huge effects on the percieved quality of the service as every personal experience will be tailored and unique to that user.

We’ve long noted how openness to new people and ideas can power innovation and economic growth. “The Open City,” a new study by Cambridge University psychologist Jason Rentfrow, offers new insight on this issue.

A large body of literature shows that highly creative people - artists, scientists, entrepreneurs and the like - are highly likely to be open to new experiences. An earlier study by Rentfrow and his colleague Sam Gosling of the University of Texas, titled "The New Geography of Personality," tracked the five major personality types across states. They found open-to-experience people were more likely to "attempt to escape the ennui experienced in small-town environments by relocating to metropolitan areas where their interests in cultures and needs for social contact and stimulation are more easily met."

It is not just that people sort themselves into places where they can find work. They seek out environments where they can pursue their personal interests as well.

Not surprisingly, given its reputation as a gay, bohemian paradise, San Francisco has the nation’s largest concentration of open-to-experience people, followed by Los Angeles, Austin, New York, and San Diego. San Antonio, Nashville, Las Vegas, Tampa, and Denver round out the top 10.

Almost all of the top metros on openness-to-experience have a considerable concentration of the creative class. Las Vegas is the exception, but its key industries, nightlife and gaming, employ open-to-experience people that lie outside the creative class.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, Detroit, Minneapolis, Cleveland, Columbus, and Pittsburgh have the nation’s smallest concentrations of open-to-experience people. Indianapolis, Kansas City, St. Louis, Memphis, and Cincinnati round out the top ten.

Rentfrow found the concentration of open personalities to be closely associated with high-tech industry, percent of foreign-born population, and the Gay Index—and these correlations held up even when controlling for the level of college graduates. Our own analysis found much the same thing: Rentfrow’s open personality measure was significantly associated with a metro’s share of the creative class and college grads, and even more so with concentrations of foreign-born people, gays and lesbians, and high-tech industry.

In research conducted jointly with Rentfrow, my team used personality surveys to map the concentration and clustering of personality types within large cities and metropolitan areas like New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, and others. Confirming Rentfrow and Gosling’s original insight, we found extreme concentrations of open-to-experience people in downtown urban neighborhoods. (Future posts will show the distribution of personality types within cities).

Rentfrow’s findings and insights have important implications for cities and for urban economic development. Numerous studies have noted the role played by highly skilled people (measured either as those with a college education or advanced degree or those in high-skill occupations) in powering regional economic growth. But psychologists like Rentfrow hone in on another dimension of skill or talent. The type of skills economists are interested in, Rentfrow notes, "implies something that can be acquired with proper training, talent, motivation, and resources."

Personality involves the capacity to acquire and perform certain tasks competently and effectively. "Personality traits predispose people to acquire certain skills," adds Rentfrow. "For example, highly conscientious people have a disposition to be detail oriented, plan ahead, or stay organized. Openness influences people’s ability to acquire new skills relatively quickly." Obviously, some people are more creative or more ambitious or more motivated than others. What separates a Steve Jobs or a Bill Gates from the pack is not just their level of education (both are famous college dropouts) or even the work they do; it is this "something else" that is at least partly captured by personality.

Rentfrow’s research also suggests a psychological dimension to creative communities that contributes to their ethos and character. It is not just that people sort themselves into places where they can find work. They seek out environments where they can pursue their personal interests as well. Clusters of open-to-experience personalities are associated with innovation because, he writes:

the jobs at the center of innovation ... such as design, engineering, science, painting, music, software development, writing and acting, appeal to individuals who are curious, creative, intellectual, imaginative, inventive, and resourceful. These professions are primarily concerned with exploring, developing and communicating new ideas, methods, and products.

People who are high in openness are also adventurous, he adds: they are likely to generate new perspectives on old issues and are comfortable with and adaptable to change.

They are also more likely to move to pursue their interests and follow their dreams. It’s not that they do this by design, the process occurs gradually and in an ad hoc way over time. But over time they seek out and find other similar personalities and begin to cluster in particular communities. These communities than take on a certain level of openness which draws in more open people and enhances its openness to new people and ideas, and ability to harness creativity and generate innovations. Openness comes to be imprinted on their psychological and cultural DNA.

It all started about 2 years ago, we had been working on a lot of products and services and have struggled a lot with making web-services and apps that should fit diffrent users needs.

So we started thinking, what if you could design a machine that would analyize the behaviour of a visitor and create a profile of that user that is unique to that user. You than would hav a very powerful way of communicating with a person without knowing them personally.

It would be like having a layer on the web that personalized every interaction. This idear has really grown on us and we are know, after 2 years of gathering of data and testing at a point where we reliably can categorize people from their behaviour.

Online fingerprint

All your geastures and activities on a webpage can be put together with big data to a digital fingerprint of who you are. Not only that, but it can also be used to match you with other people. You se, people that behave alike also likes similar things.

Personliganyheter.se

We are really soon going to launch personliganyheter.se, our first "proof-of-concept" to our technology. Here you will be fed news based on your behaviour. We are also looking for the next pilot cutomer to use our technology in their system.

If you would like to discuss any cooporation possibilities, send us an email at info@individlabs.com (we loove coffe!)